


with sweetness and light

by gooseberry



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Brotherhood, Dreams and Nightmares, Dwarf Culture & Customs, Dwarves, Gen, Ghosts, Gothic, Letters, Moria | Khazad-dûm, Third Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 11:30:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13053132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: Ori says louder, so that Vestri can hear despite his poor hearing and heavy breathing, “I was thinking of how many dwarves there must have been, when we lived here still.”“A great many, I imagine,” Vestri says. “But we shall fill the halls again. We will be gathered again, and we will live here again.”It is a lovely sentiment, but there is something sad and dark beneath it. To fill something again—to live somewhere again—means that you had left that place before; maybe you left out of desire, or maybe you were driven out, but either way, it stands that you left. This—the Kingdom of Durin, the Halls of Khazad-dum—is a dark, cold world of empty halls, because the dwarves were driven away. There is something sad and something awful about it, about the stone walls and bridges that have fallen and broken because the dwarves who were meant to live here were forced to leave.--In which Ori joins Balin's Company, goes to Khazad-dum, writes letters to Dori, and basically loses his mind because of Khazad-dum. It's a lot of sad, gothic-y, vaguely creepy thoughts about Khazad-dum, and how places are haunted by the events that transpire within them. TA 2989-2994.





	with sweetness and light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunarium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarium/gifts).



“Are you certain?” Nori asks as he helps Ori close his pack. “You know he will be angry.”

“He will be angry no matter what I do.” Ori grunts as he yanks at the ties of his pack, trying to close it tighter. “If I say goodbye, if I do not, if he comes with me, if he stays— He can never come to his own decision, and then he becomes angry at me— ”

“Ori,” Nori says, and his voice sounds sharp—sharper than Ori expects. Ori stops and, when Nori says his name again, lifts his head to meet Nori’s eyes. Nori is frowning at him, and Ori feels a flush of shame crawl up the back of his neck. 

“That is unkind of you, Ori,” Nori says a little more gently, which only serves to make Ori feel more ashamed. “He worries about you, just as he worries about me, and as I worry about you both, and as you worry about us.”

“I know,” Ori says quietly; his voice sounds miserable to his own ears, and he ducks his head, turning his attention back to his pack. 

Nori’s sigh is long and heavy sounding, and it sounds uncannily like Dori’s sighs whenever Dori has been bothered by something Ori did or didn’t do. It makes Ori feel all the worse, and he can feel the beginning of a creeping anger beneath the shame, a growing frustration that he is being scolded. Before he has opened his mouth to lash out at Nori, though, Nori is saying, “Just try not to leave angry, Ori. Please,” Nori says, and when he claps his hand on Ori’s shoulder, it is heavy and warm and feels like it may leave a bruise. “If you leave angry, you will only have regrets.”

“I will not,” Ori says, the words feeling strained, like he has to force them up out of his throat and his mouth, and he is unsure if he is saying that he will not leave angry, or if he will not have regrets. He has not time to puzzle it out, though, because Nori claps his hand on Ori’s shoulder again, then tightens his hand into a fist in the fabric of Ori’s heavy shirt. Before Ori can protest, Nori is pulling Ori up, then pulling him into a tight hug.

“I will miss you, Ori,” Nori whispers, and when Ori realizes that Nori’s hands are shaking where they are clenching the fabric of Ori’s shirt, Ori cannot stop himself from wrapping his arms around Nori in turn. 

“Go with our love,” Nori tells him, “and with our blessing.”

x

The first time that Ori admits that he has regrets is the day they bury Floi. The grave is small, and the marker is smaller—just a simple slat of stone until they have time to build something better, as Balin says. All in all, the grave and marker seem small and easily forgotten, particularly in relation to the breadth of Kheled-zaram and the height of the three mountains, and Ori thinks, _I am just as small and as insignificant as he was._

He tries to shove the thought down, tries to bury it beneath the thrill and magnificence of Khazad-dum. There is a headiness in the company, an intoxicating sort of assurance, and Ori tries to cling to that as they, Balin’s Company, the Dwarves of Durin, take back Khazad-dum proper. 

Khazad-dum herself, though, is a different sort of intoxicating. She is great heights and greater depths, hallways that stretch beyond the range of dwarvish eyes and ears; she is dark and cold and powerful, and she makes Ori’s head spin with bewilderment. She is too much—too large, too cold, too ancient, too empty.

Much too empty.

The company spends weeks moving through the upper levels, moving on, and on, and ever on, and each day they pass by dozens of halls, leading to dozens of halls more. Doors—broken, hanging open on old metal and stone hinges and frames—lead to rooms of a number that Ori cannot fathom. He cannot fathom it, because this—this was once a kingdom, filled with dwarves.

“How many dwarves there must have been,” he murmurs once, when the company is climbing up to the eleventh hall. They are in the southern reaches of Khazad-dum, and they will move through eleventh level as a compass: south, west, north, and east. They will walk on and on and on, through crumbling halls and corridors, each hall and corridor as large and as empty as the last, each hall and corridor lined with as many doors and entryways and arches as the last.

“What’s that?” Vestri asks Ori, turning his head to look back down over his shoulder at Ori. He is an old dwarf, older even than Balin, and he is puffing heavily as he climbs the stairs. 

Ori says louder, so that Vestri can hear despite his poor hearing and heavy breathing, “I was thinking of how many dwarves there must have been, when we lived here still.”

“Hmm,” Vestri hums, nodding sagely—a little like Gandalf, if Ori thinks of it, or like Ori’s grandfather; perhaps it is a habit of the older and wiser. “A great many, I imagine,” Vestri says. “But we shall fill the halls again. We will be gathered again, and we will live here again.”

It is a lovely sentiment, but there is something sad and dark beneath it. To fill something again—to live somewhere again—means that you had left that place before; maybe you left by your own choice, or maybe you were driven out, but either way, it stands that you left. This—the Kingdom of Durin, the Halls of Khazad-dum—is a dark, cold world of empty halls, because the dwarves were driven away. There is something sad and something awful about it, about the stone walls and bridges that have fallen and broken because the dwarves who were meant to live here were forced to leave. 

Vestri’s optimism seems to be matched by most of the dwarves of the company, and at night, when they are preparing to rest, most of the dwarves will talk of what the future will be: a kingdom of beauty and light, the halls crowded with dwarrow men and women and childen, with the living noise of an entire race echoing within the living stone of the mountains. The future, they say to one another, is bright; the future will be a beautiful, glorious thing; the future will be a blessing. 

Ori sits, and listens, and tries not to wonder, _Why could not our past be blessed, too?_

x

In the end, Balin decides that the company will settle in the twenty-first hall, on the north end. The company sets to the task of making a livable situation with a might and a mind, and a series of rooms and halls are cleared and repaired in quick succession. The daytime toil is long and heavy, but the benefits of having a permanent location are quickly evident. There is more time to rest and to plan, and there is the assured safety of heavy doors that have been mended and will now properly lock into place. 

There is more time to think, and Ori finds himself thinking relentlessly. 

He thinks of Khazad-dum and her empty halls; he thinks of Erebor and the Blue Mountains, and the dwarves who live in each; he thinks of Nori and he thinks of Dori, and he thinks of his regrets.

By Durin’s Day, the company is firmly entrenched, prepared to weather the cold and hunger of the winter, and they celebrate their readiness. There is food—not too much, as they must take care of rations; there is dancing and music—a great deal more of those, potentially too much; and there is conversation—dwarves reminiscing on their sweethearts and their kin and their homes from before. When Ori is warm and full and tipsy from his extra portion of beer, he leaves the company, and he goes and settles himself down with his things.

He has no sweetheart, and has never particularly wanted one; he has kin, though, and a home that he left behind, and so he pulls out his materials, and he begins to write:

_Dear Dori,_

_It is Durin’s Day. I wish you a blessed day, and that your year will be filled with sweetness and light. I know_

He pauses and considers the words; he considers scratching out the last two, then reconsiders. After a few moments, he continues:

_that it has been some time since you have heard from me. I meant to write sooner, but every day has been very busy. I ask for your forgiveness, regarding the lateness of this letter._

_I am writing this letter from the twenty-first hall of Khazad-dum. We entered the halls several months ago, and we have been here since._

_Khazad-dum is not like any other place I have lived. It is so very large, Dori. If you consider combining Erebor with the Blue Mountains, as well as the Iron Hills, then you may have something of the idea of how large it is. For all our months here, I believe we have barely scratched the surface._

Ori stops again, lifting his quill to brush the feathered end across his cheek. He reads what he has written once, then twice, and he thinks of Nori, sending him away with the family’s love and blessing. He thinks of Nori saying, _He worries about you_ , and he clears his throat before he lowers his head and begins to write again. 

_It is beautiful. The greater halls are impossibly high, so high that we cannot always see the ceiling, and the columns are beautifully carved. We have already repaired the halls and rooms where we are currently staying, and we are rebuilding more each day. There has been a great deal of talk on how Khazad-dum will soon be the home of our people again. I hope that both you and Nori will come someday soon, and that we will celebrate Durin’s Day in the Halls of Durin as a family._

Ori considers his letter again, then signs, _With the greatest love and brotherly affection, I remain yours, Ori._ He pounces the letter a little clumsily, still a little tipsy from the celebrations, and when he folds the letter into eighths, the paper feels a bit gritty. Still, it is enough to quiet the questioning regrets in his mind.

x

What he truly thinks of Khazad-dum is that she is as beautiful and cold as a frozen lake. There is a hall not far from the company’s encampment that looks as though it is all black glass, the walls and columns a dark stone that shines wetly in lamplight. That hall, Ori thinks, is more than a passable picture of Khazad-dum as a whole. 

When the hall was lit a thousand years ago, it must have been a place of light and life and warmth; the lights must have bounced off the mirror-like stone, reflected and refracted a thousand times over. Perhaps it had looked like the world after a spring rain: the wetness of stone and the cascade of rainbow-like prisms. Now, though, with only a handful of lamps to light the vast hall, the dark sheen of the stone seems to engulf the light, like dark, deep waters waiting to drown the careless—or maybe the wet shine of the stone is more like the shine of dark ice, unassuming and deadly, a cold slickness that will send an unlucky dwarf tumbling from a mountainside. 

Khazad-dum is beautiful, but she is also frightening, and Ori cannot stop himself from thinking of how easily she might consume those who live within her—and Ori cannot stop himself from wondering how many ghosts must still live within her stone halls, beneath the ice-like sheen of her walls. Khazad-dum’s beauty is the type of beauty that is relentless, that will eat away at a dwarf until there is nothing left of him. Khazad-dum, Ori thinks, will drive them on and on and on—higher and deeper, farther and further, until each one of them has bled himself into her darkness.

x

One year passes, and Ori writes a letter to Dori, wishing him a blessed Durin’s Day. 

_I wish you,_ he writes, just as he wrote the year before, _a new year filled with sweetness and light._

There are a stack of letters now, most of them addressed to Dori, with only a few addressed to Nori. The dwarves rarely venture out from Khazad-dum, and Ori ventures out even less than most others. While there have been a few traders passing by the foothills of the mountains, and while there has been some bits of trade—a few precious metals and some cunningly made trinkets exchanged for the essentials of food and cloth—there has been nothing formalized in regards to trade routes. The lack of a formalized trade route means that no one has been able to send a message home, whether to Ered Luin or to Erebor. Ori tries not to consider what Dori and Nori must think, what with having had no word from Ori for more than a year and a half.

Instead, he writes steadily, adding paragraphs to his letters whenever Khazad-dum feels too large or too cold or too dark. He write about her beauty, about her richness, about those few treasures that can still be found if a dwarf looks hard enough. 

He writes his letters, and another year passes, and another, and another. He writes and he writes and he writes, and he wonders if his brothers ever feel the sting of regret, too.

x

“Have you seen Tor?” Nyi asks. Ori looks up at him, blinking to clear his eyes. 

It’s early afternoon, and the light in the hall has grown dim as the sun has passed over the mountain; they’re relying on lamps now, and the flickering of the light and the intensity with which Ori has been peering at carved work causes his eyesight to swim when he tries to focus on Nyi, who is standing on the far side of the table.

“No,” Ori says, and from farther down the table Anar says, “I thought he was going down to the seventeenth hall? You might ask Thekkr, he may know.”

“I have,” Nyi says, sounding rather cross. Ori blinks, then rubs his right eye, taking care not to transfer grit from his gloves to his eye. When he looks at Nyi again, Nyi looks as cross as he sounds as he says: “He said he would help me with the bridge today. If you see him, tell him that I have gone to the bridge, and that he’d best meet me there if he does not wish to have words.”

Ori nods along as Anar says that they will, and they watch as Nyi leaves the room, his boots clumping heavily with the weight of his forceful stride.

“Tor will regret that,” Ori says, feeling grateful that he is not the dwarf in Nyi’s current sights, or in Nyi’s inevitable warpath. Anar chuckles and agrees, and Ori rubs his eye once more before he bends to his work.

He has mostly forgotten about Tor’s absence by the time supper has come around; he is reminded of it when he enters the dining hall with Anar, and they find themselves waylaid by Anar’s elder brother. 

“Anar,” Nar calls, and when he motions for Anar to come and join him, Ori follows along. Nar is pleasant enough, and he spares a smile and a _Good evening_ for Ori before he slings an arm across Anar’s shoulders, asking him, “Well, have you seen Tor?”

“No,” Anar answers, and Ori adds, “Nyi asked us earlier today. Has he not found him yet?”

“Not yet.” Nar’s laugh sounds much like Anar’s, and Ori thinks that they look much the same whenever they smile, as they do now. “Tor will regret it when Nyi finds him.”

“That is what I said,” Ori murmurs, and he feels a rush of pleasure when Nar laughs louder, saying, “Right you are, Ori. Come, both of you should eat your supper with me tonight.”

Ori doesn’t forget about Tor’s absence again, but it does sink to the back of his mind, only a faint thread of amused anticipation for the inevitable tongue-lashing that Tor will receive from Nyi. It remains that way for the rest of the night, into the following morning. Then, slowly, the thread begins to twist itself into knots in Ori’s mind, and it must be the same with the other dwarves, because the following afternoon—when there still has been no sign of Tor—dwarves begin to speak quietly amongst themselves.

“Has anyone checked the seventeenth hall?”

“Are there any newly fallen walls?”

“Should we check below the bridge?”

The questions are all asked quietly, and it seems that no one is meeting anyone else’s eyes. Ori cannot meet anyone’s eyes, because to look at someone’s eyes, and to ask, _Do you think—_ seems a dangerous thing to do. Words have power, and to speak possibilities into the air—to speak them loudly enough that the walls of Khazad-dum may hear them—is a dangerous thing to do.

By the second evening, a committee is rounded up. Ori sits on the edge of it, listening as dwarves fret to and fro, and when the committee splits into search parties, Ori joins the same party as Anar and Nar. Their party is sent down to the bridge where Tor was meant to Nyi the morning before, and they slowly, methodically search the area. 

The light of their lamps spills over the edge of the bridge like water, pours down into the dark chasm below; Ai, the smallest and lightest amongst them, is fastened with belts and ropes and lowered down, farther and farther until he calls up, “Stop, stop! There is water, stop!”

They listen to the sound of splashing—Ai’s feet breaking the surface of the water, perhaps, or maybe rocks tumbling into the water from Ai’s groping at the wall. Ori leans over the edge of the bridge, straining his eyes to see the glimmer of Ai’s lantern, casting strange reflections on the water.

After a few moments—not particularly long, but certainly long enough for Ai to begin cursing the water, his voice echoing upwards—they hear Ai call for them to pull him up, and Ori stands up again, grabbing onto the rope to help the others haul Ai back up.

“The water is very dark,” Ai says when he is standing on the bridge again, unfastening the buckles of the belts lashed across his body, “and very cold. The surface looks still, but when I put my hand below, the current was fast.”

Ai doesn’t say, _If someone fell,_ but Ori thinks it, and Ori knows that everyone else thinks it, too.

_If Tor fell—_

When they reconvene with the other parties, each party seems to have the same to say: 

“There was no sign of him,” they all say; “It was very dark,” and “It was very cold,” they say; “The depths,” some say, while others say, “If he fell—”

“Perhaps,” Bruni says after each party has reported, “he is only hiding. Nyi’s temper, after all—perhaps he is only waiting it out.”

When Ori looks around the committee, he sees a few smiles, but he hears no one laugh.

x

Tor is never seen again. Several more search parties are sent out, to check and recheck bridges and halls, to search out those quietly spoken possibilities from before. There is, however, no sign of Tor, and after several weeks, the search parties are disbanded. Even if Tor had been still alive—hurt or lost, but still alive—during the first week, there is little chance that he is still alive once time has passed the seventh week. Dwarves may be hardy souls, able to bear hunger and cold, but dwarves are mortal still, and Khazad-dum—with her dark, cold halls, flooded with dark, cold water—is not a kind mistress. Without shelter, without food, without heat or dry clothing, there is little chance that Tor survived for very long after his fall. Or after he became lost. Or after he turned and began to descend, deeper and deeper into the cold center of the mountains. 

Tor’s disappearance weighs heavily on the community. When the searches stop after the seventh week, the gloomy atmosphere that has been hanging over the twenty-first hall seems to grow heavier. When dwarves speak, they speak in low voices, and when the fires burn, they seem to burn lower and dimmer. Even the sun seems to grow gloomy, the eastern light of the morning barely creeping into the greater halls. 

Then, in the midst of this gloom, two more dwarves disappear. 

It is at breakfast, when the light is beginning to catch on the vaults above, that Lofar asks, “Where are Finnr and Ginnar?”

A heavy silence follows Lofar’s question, and Ori feels his stomach tighten in a peculiar way, like there is stone in his stomach and his stomach is trying to curl about it. He lays his spoon down beside his bowl, then looks to his left and to his right. Others, he sees, are doing the same, looking about the dining hall as if to spy Finnr and Ginnar out. 

There are eight-seven dwarves, given Tor’s disappearance. It is a small enough number that it is easy to pick out names, to see who is and who is not present, and Finnr and Ginnar—

“When were they last seen?” Balin asks, and when Ori looks over toward him, he sees that Balin has risen to stand at the head of his table. He is frowning, and he is tugging at the end of his beard as he looks about the room. “Did anyone see them yesterday?”

No one replies, and when Ori looks about, he sees that no one has raised their hand. Balin asks, “The day before? The day before? The day before?”

It is decided that it has been three days since anyone remembers seeing Finnr and Ginnar—or at least, that anyone remembers seeing them for certain. It was here, in the dining hall, just after breakfast. Finnr and Ginnar had eaten their breakfasts, and had offered their good mornings and good days, and had gone on their way, to—

“To what?” Balin asks, but there is no sure answer. Had they been meant to shore up a wall? Were they going down to help with the mining? What where they meant to do, and where were they meant to be?

It is much the same as several months ago: search parties are sent out, and search parties report back in. There are no signs of Finnr and Ginnar, and with the summer coming to its end, the halls of Khazad-dum seem to grow colder by the day. Perhaps it is because of the gloomy atmosphere already hanging over them before Finnr and Ginnar’s disappearance, or perhaps it is because of the changing seasons, but the searches this time seem even more hopeless than before. It is only a handful of weeks—into the beginning of autumn—before the searches come to an end.

“No one,” Balin says when he calls off the search, “is to travel through the halls alone, and no one is to travel without informing others of where one is headed.” He is petting his beard, smoothing it down over his chest and belly, and his face looks grim. He looks about the room slowly, like he is meeting each dwarf’s eyes; when he meets Ori’s eyes, Ori can only meet Balin’s eyes for a moment before he has to look away. When he looks back, Balin has already turned to look at other dwarves. 

“Durin’s Day will be here soon, and winter with it. The mountain will grow colder, and when the water freezes, the stone will crack. Khazad-dum,” Balin says, “is not like other dwarvish mountains. She has been home to darker things for many long years, and many of our generations have lived far beyond her. 

“She does not remember us yet, and there is not yet security and warmth in her embrace. You must,” Balin commands, “show great care. Do not underestimate her, and do not trust her—not yet.”

The dwarves murmur their assent; Ori follows the others around him and obediently says, “Yes, Balin.”

He begins a letter that night:

_Dear Dori,_

_It is autumn now. The summer passed quickly, perhaps because we were busy with many things. The mine has been progressing well. We have been able to extract true-silver from several new veins, and our production has increased. The forge and the foundry are continuing much the same. I believe Balin would be very happy to have more smiths amongst our number._

_I have taken my turns in the mines and in the foundry, but I have also been given a new task in the upper halls. There are carvings most everywhere, and Balin has tasked a number of us with copying down the carvings before things, bridges and walls and doors and the like, are broken down or built back up. Some of the carvings are quite standard, shapes or animals or the like, but some are quite ornate. There are also runes and glyphs, of course. Most of the writing is Khuzdul, but there are the odd bits in Elvish. Mostly Feanorian, from what I have seen. You may take pride in that—no one else is quite as comfortable with Elvish characters._

_With Durin’s Day coming, and winter behind it, it is becoming very cold and a bit gloomy. We have become a little smaller in number. Three dwarves have left us. I believe some members of the company are beginning to miss their homes and their families. Perhaps that is why_

He stops, uncertain what else to write. He cannot decide; should he say, _I am thinking of returning_? Or, _we are beginning to lose dwarves_? Should he tell Dori the truth? _Others have disappeared; I am afraid that I will disappear, too. Dori, I am sorry that I left, and that I disappeared. I do not want to disappear again—_

He writes none of those things. He leaves the letter unfinished, the sentence cut in half: _Perhaps that is why_. He pounces the letter, then sets to the side, tucked amongst the other letters; he cleans his quill, then puts it away with his ink pot and pounce pot. He is done for now—he will finish the letter another day, when he is more able to think clearly. 

When he retires that night, it takes him a long time to fall asleep. He thinks of Balin’s words, turning them over and over in his head. He mouths them to himself silently, forming them with his tongue and lips: _She does not remember us yet_ , he mouths to himself; _She has been home to darker things_. He says silently to himself, _I wish I had never left you._

In time, though, he falls asleep, and when he dreams, he dreams of darker things—things with spindly limbs and blind eyes, covered with slimy skin and mossy hair—crawling through the halls of Khazad-dum. They creep onward, with cracking joints, moving arm over leg like spiders; they move like broken things and drowned things, and they climb up from Khazad-dum’s flooded depths, higher and higher and higher—

x

He thinks he sees things, sometimes. 

Not all the time, of course. If he saw things all the time, then he would think he was going mad, and if he thought he was going mad—well, he is not certain what he would do, but it would not be this: going about his day as normally as possible, eating breakfast and doing his work, eating lunch and gossiping with friends, eating dinner and singing songs. 

It is only sometimes that he see things—or that he thinks he sees things. It is when he is walking through the dimly lit halls, alongside Veigr or Ai or Anar, that he sometimes sees movement in the dark shadows, far beyond the reach of the lamplight. Sometimes it looks like figures scurrying around corners, and sometimes it looks like forms stretching up into the wall; sometimes it looks like a great beast, yawning a hungry mouth that is darker than the water all those floors below. He tries not to startle at the things he thinks he sees, or the sounds—the rasp of dry skin dragging across the floor, or the splat of wet limbs climbing over a bridge—that he thinks he hears. 

When he does startle, he apologizes for it, telling his companions, “I have an overly active imagination. I fancy I see things, or hear things. It is a little silly, I know—”

The rest of the company is patient with him, and even a little kind. There is teasing, of course—Nar asks if Ori would prefer a lamp remain lit during the night, and Vetr and Letr take turns trying to frighten him with ghost stories—but the teasing feels kindhearted and warm. The teasing feels like the brotherly exasperation of Dori and Nori. The teasing allows Ori to tell himself, _It is only my imagination. There is nothing else here—only us, and the mountains._

And when his brain feels too fevered, when it feels like the dark depths of the halls are crouching, waiting to leap upon him and swallow him whole, he writes:

_Khazad-dum is glorious. Khazad-dum is beautiful. Khazad-dum will be a manor of sweetness and light._

He does not write that he is lonely without his brothers, or that the cold of the mountain has sunk into his bones; he does not write that he feels like he is disappearing, bled dry by the Halls of Durin. He does not write about his dreams, and about the creeping things that are trapped here, chained down by a thousand years of darkness. 

He writes, _I dream of the day that Durin’s folk will once again live in his halls_ , and when he goes to his bed, he pulls his blankets over his head and clenches his eyes shut and covers his ears, praying until he can fall asleep.

x

On Durin’s Day, Ori pulls out his materials: paper, ink, pounce, and quill. He smooths the paper, pounces it, then begins to write:

_Dear Dori,_

_It is Durin’s Day. I wish you a blessed year, full of sweetness and light. I pray that next year, we may spend Durin’s Day together as a family, within the Halls of Durin. Khazad-dum is a lovely place, and when she is full of our people, I believe we will finally be home._

_I hope that you_

“Ori?”

It is Bruni, standing in front of Ori, frowning and rocking on his feet. When Ori asks what is the matter, Bruni’s frown grows deeper, making Bruni’s face look wrinkled and pinched. 

“Have you seen Balin?” Bruni asks. “Vestri wants to begin the celebrations, but we cannot find him.”

Ori feels that rock in his stomach, the one that feels heavy and colder every day, and he tries not to think of Tor and Finnr and Ginnar—he tries not to think of Floi’s grave, how small and insignificant it is next to cold enormity of the mountains. He tries not to think of the things that creep through his dreams, creaking and groaning like the voices of broken-hearted mountains.

He tries not to think, and he opens his mouth to apologize. Behind him, though, Ai is saying, “I think I saw him head down toward the Great Gates, toward Kheled-zaram.”

Bruni’s face clears remarkably fast, his frown turning into a smile, and Ori feels the rock in his stomach begin to lighten—not much, but a little; just enough. Bruni rocks on his feet again, and he chuckles as he pats his belly, saying, “Ah, well, it is Durin’s Day. He must want to see if there are seven stars for his head, too. 

“I will go on down,” Bruni continues, “and fetch him back for Vestri, so that we can begin our celebrations properly.”

Ori lays his quill next to his unfinished letter and closes his ink bottle quickly, then rises from his seat, saying, “Bruni, wait. I will come with you.”


End file.
